Fire Warrior

Voices clamoured in his mind: gossamer wisps of text and oration, propaganda and meditation. “Focus,” they chimed. “Unity.” They filled his skull with a coiling serpent of racial assurance, a million and one certainties of the superiority of the tau’va.

They wouldn’t — couldn’t — help him anymore. Where was the great unity now? Where was the species struggle, supporting him as he supported it? Where was the great machine when he needed it? Where was the Greater Good to be found in dying here, broken and bewildered, on the floor of this filthy gue’la place?

His stomach knotted and with a groan, failing even in his ability to suppress his reactions, he waited to die. The marine stepped forwards, soot-blemished armour parting the clouds of weapon smoke. It was death, stalking through the cloudbanked atmosphere. Its eyes blazed.

Ave Imperator, it said, the distorted voice cold and artificial. The gun raised again. Kais couldn’t even bring himself to tense his muscles.

“Shas’la...” a voice said, shakily. “Sh... Shas...”

It was a ray of light stammering on the serenity of its own words. It was a dreamscent, whispering past his senses, a pheromone medley of spice and fruit. It was a song without a chorus, a breathless celebration of melody and rhythm, stained by a taint of discordant pain.

Kais twisted his head without thinking, unable to control his mind, finding his gaze filled by Aun’el T’au Ko’vash. The torture device had ascended into the shadows, leaving blotched burns and scratches across the ethereal’s pate. Weak and frail, shaking from the bone-pitted wound above his nasal orifice, the Aun raised his head defiantly and fixed Kais with a stare of pure peace. It filled his mind, overriding every sense in a rush of inexorable calmness. It waved away the smoke and the pain, it washed clean the blood in his brain and assuaged his racing thoughts. He was a puppet to it: an empty vessel given awareness of its own hollowness and somehow, against every expectation, glad of it.

If I am nothing as an individual, his mind said, then let me be content with my place in a higher order.

And he was.

In that instant, in that surreal moment of exposure to the ancient wisdom of the Aun, Shas’la T’au Kais was a functioning, satisfied piece of the machine.

“Never... alone...” the ethereal said weakly.

Kais picked up the dead gue’la’s plasma pistol. He hadn’t even noticed it at his feet. He was a glove, to be filled and worn, to be manipulated and moved as the Aun saw fit. It all happened so quickly, without seeming to happen at all.

He shot the Space Marine twice. The first hazing orb of superheated plasma punched a deep crater in its torso plating, sending spiderlike fissures scuttling across the green surface. The figure toppled backwards, startled, weapon chattering spastically, spare hand clutching at the air.

The second plasma bolt hit the Marine’s scowling faceplate, shattering its eyelenses like glass, engulfing it in a cloud of igniting fragments and outwards-spreading gore — a thick soup of smoke and blood that followed the enormous hulk as it tumbled backwards, crashing chaotically to the ground. It shivered and whined as the last vestiges of the armour’s power reserves expended into the air.

It died by degrees, flailing extremities slowing in their mad flexes until everything was silent. Kais wondered if anything would ever seem real again.

He retrieved the pathetic remains of his rifle and turned to the Aun, still seated in pain and exhaustion. His slender fingers brushed lightly across the wound on his head, exploring its severity. Like all ethereals, his face was longer than most taus’, the gentle bisecting line of his scent orifice wider and more pronounced, lifted by the diamond-shaped ridge of bone at its centre. It was above this mysterious feature — the identifying mark of his caste — that the ugly wound marred his scalp. He winced momentarily, then his long features resolved into a glowing aspect of calmness and determination.

Here, Kais saw, was focus. Here was devotion to the tau’va on a scale he could barely imagine. Here was faith, and it was contagious. Despite the Aun’s fragility he carried an invisible aura, a mantle of contentment that hung around him, allaying every one of Kais’s fears, soothing his turbulent thoughts. He lowered his gaze, awash with devotion and respect.

“You have my thanks, Shas’la,” the ethereal purred, even his voice carrying a medicinal quality. In some quiet corner of his mind Kais felt manipulated, as if the mere presence of the Aun could blast away whatever shreds of individuality he might possess. But he couldn’t rage against the violation — he was powerless against it and, worse, he enjoyed it. Somehow, without even touching him, the Aun could reach inside his mind and show him how to belong.

Kais spoke into his comm, fighting to tear his gaze away from the luminous being before him.

“Shas’el?” he rasped, voice dry.

“La’Kais!” came Lusha’s reply, full of relief. “We weren’t able to fix on you. We assumed... Shas’la: what’s your status?”

“The Aun is free, Shas’el. He’s wounded. We...”

“Hold on, Kais. We’re getting your signal again.”

A green bar of characters within his HUD — ominously absent for too long — chimed to life, confirming the sensor contact. It felt like a tiny slice of T’au — a portion of efficiency and logic lighting up this dark place of gue’la ugliness.

A thought occurred. “El’Lusha — did the prisoners get out?”

“They did. La’Y’hol led them to safety through the ruins, despite his injuries.” Lusha sounded amused. “The por’hui have got their hands on the footage already, I’m told.” Kais smiled to himself, imagining Y’hol’s proud, gri

“Our troops are holding out above ground,” Lusha continued. “The surveyor drones have picked up a collapsed cavern near your position. We’ll airlift you out.”

The coordinates blinked to life in Kais’s vision, an impossible promise of freedom. He could barely allow himself to believe it was real.

Lusha’s voice suddenly didn’t seem so far away at all. “You’re coming home, Kais.”

The dropship left the battle behind, pulling away through the lazy columns of smoke towards the edge of the crater valley. Below, Lusha could see the last vestiges of gue’la resistance surrendering their posts and dashing for the cover of the underground levels exposed by the orbital strike. It didn’t matter. The pathfinder squads would pick them off one at a time, more through professional completism than any great need to cull the gue’la numbers. La’Kais had done it.

He could hardly believe it. The youth had been out of contact, hidden to the dropship’s sensors behind countless layers of rock and steel. But the truth was there, displayed before his eyes on the monitors. Aun’el T’au Ko’vash — looking weak and wounded but alive, slowly but surely picking his way through the caverns towards freedom.

Lusha mumbled a litany of affirmation and watched the extraction point grow ever nearer.

A broken component — that’s how he’d described Kais to the shas’o. Had he been right? It hardly seemed to matter now. His gamble had paid off: the inexplicably bizarre gue’la scheme — whatever it had been — had been foiled and punished. Let that be an end to it.

But it wouldn’t be. Oh, no. He’d seen the report, compiled and transmitted from the Or’es Tash’var half a dec earlier. High above the smoking, debris-strewn plains of Dolumar IV, prowling out of the warp like a shoal of rampaging t’pel sharks, the gue’la fleet had arrived.